Tim Lott's first book, The Scent of Dried Roses, was a vivid memoir of his own clinical depression and his mother's suicide. His second, a work of fiction, White City Blue, was a blackly comic study of the absolute soullessness of urban English male culture.

In between times, in Granta, he wrote a bleak account of his marriage breaking up, which involved detailed descriptions of his daughter's bedwetting and his own misogynistic rages. In this novel, perhaps as a sop to loyal readers, he gets anything in the way of hope out of the road early on: his main character throws himself under an articulated lorry in the prologue.

Rumours of a Hurricane then constructs the back story of this suicide, the tale of a dull marriage from between the wars: Falklands and Gulf. Charlie Buck is a newspaper compositor who spends the early Thatcher years mostly on the picket line at Wapping, holding tight both to a Thermos and a vague belief in the power of labour. His wife, Maureen, gets his tea on the table at the appointed hour, jogs forlornly to combat the gravity that assails her breasts and thighs, dresses up to watch Dallas, and has long since given up hope of her husband ever locating her clitoris.

They save money carefully; he for new bits for his model railway, she for an even rainier day. They have a son, Robert, who is on the dole, and of whom they expect little and get less. Their love life consists of Charlie quietly masturbating on to Terylene sheets over the thought of Sue Ellen, while Maureen snores beside him.

In the absence of emotions, they have possessions. These are mostly unwanted Christmas presents, the kinds of things that will be familiar from Channel 4's I Love the 70s or similar: Goblin Teasmades, Hai Karate aftershave, toasted sandwich makers, anything by Pifco or K-Tel, that kind of thing.

As the Eighties take a grip of Maureen and Charlie, however, they become caught up in the self-gratifying spirit of the times, and they swap their certainties for aspirations. They first buy their council flat, then a grim 'I wish I lived here' house on an estate in Milton Keynes. Charlie builds a conservatory, purchases his utility shares and, we are asked to believe, sells his working-class soul.

Maureen, buoyed by the example of her Prime Minister, begins to assert herself in curious ways. She takes to shoplifting as a form of personal empowerment and starts sleeping with her driving instructor in the afternoons. Robert finds a job in one of the few growth industries of the era - he becomes a riot policeman.

Lott pieces together the domestic detail of this colourless transformation with an eerie kind of obsession and, apparently, one eye on a vintage Argos catalogue. He then makes it stand for a culture. His writing always has a distinctive, flat rigour, and here he matches the suffocation of the lives he describes with a slyly deadened prose. This is a novel about the England in which 'coffee is instant. Bread is sliced. Weather is rainy', and it adopts pre-packaged ironies to match.

Charlie is portrayed as a man who 'does not understand happiness, only its absence' and who believes that 'sadness is so much more a dogged force in the world'. This psychology makes for a satire of sorts, but one in which most of the humour is grey and any feeling at all beyond a kind of unrealised despair has been leeched out. Perhaps this is what the Eighties were about, but perhaps, too, human experience is always a bit more complex than this. Certainly, Lott has gone to great lengths to get inside these grim lives and to rub our noses in their emptiness but for all his efforts his empathy feels like a cool contempt.

The experience of reading this book sometimes reminded me a little of walking through a gallery of Richard Billingham's photographs of his parents drunk in front of the telly in their council flat. It has a look of reality, and you can't help but stare with a kind of cringing fascination, but while the ugliness of Billingham's pictures is redeemed by his intimacy with their subjects, Lott can't help but keep just a little bit of distance. As a result, you never much care how things turn out for Maureen and Charlie, beyond hoping they might cheer up a little, and it doesn't really feel like he does, either.